National Security (State Threats) Bill

Lord Walney Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Walney (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow that thoughtful speech from the noble Lord, Lord Docherty. There is one person who I wish we could have heard from today: our dear friend Meta, Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale. She was such an extraordinary expert on these issues for many years in the House and in her career as an intelligence officer. We said goodbye to her at a very moving funeral last Friday in Glasgow. I was gathering memories and stories about Meta, and one that is pertinent to share just now is when she gave a speech, I think in Tel Aviv, on Iran. This erudite, softly spoken woman, who everyone really wanted to be their great-aunt, gently said that the IRGC

“must be eliminated—and I really do mean eliminated”.

My friend recalled the jaw of the British ambassador next to him dropping as she said that.

Those words are pertinent, because I really hope that the Minister will listen to that and agree to be a little bit more Meta on this Bill. Although I welcome it like everybody else, it does not achieve the Government’s and Jonathan Hall’s stated aim of an equivalent measure to terrorist proscription. It is weaker in an array of respects; there are excuses provided by the Government for each, but the cumulative effect is a significantly weaker regime.

The noble Lord, Lord Polak, made a pertinent point about Hezbollah. Unlike the majority of noble Lords who have spoken—including learned noble Lords with much greater experience on the subject of terrorism—who appear to have accepted Jonathan Hall’s analysis, I still question why we cannot take the approach that we did in 2019 with Hezbollah and which the US, Canada, Australia and the European Union have taken in fully proscribing the IRGC as a terrorist organisation.

That said, we are where we are. We are going to get the Bill on to the statute book, apparently with extraordinary speed. Despite us having asked for this and the Government having thought about it for more than 14 months, I really hope that they will agree to take an extra day or so to strengthen the Bill, rather than railroading a weaker measure through to the Commons. I am afraid one would have to assume, if the Government maintain this speed of timetable, that they are doing it as an excuse to get a weaker Bill on the statute book rather than taking that a couple of extra days potentially to strengthen it.

The Government talked about the system of immunity and the Vienna convention demanding a higher bar as reasons for some of these measures not matching terrorist proscription. However, we are not proscribing Tehran here; we are prosecuting operatives who are using all the tools of terrorism to do their work. Perhaps this points to the need for the IRGC to be treated as a conventional terrorist organisation, unlike some of the other organisations to which this legislation may end up applying. Although I take the argument that, in many circumstances, you would not wish to fully treat the people who are operating as part of a state enterprise as terrorist operatives, it is the case that the IRGC has been, effectively, a full-blown terrorist organisation under our very eyes for many years. It would send a strong signal to treat it as such, with all the authority and the taboo which would surround even those state officials. They would try to claim diplomatic immunity, but we would say that the way this organisation operates is so heinous that they deserve the full force of terrorism law. I hope the Government are open to strengthening the approach.

In Committee, I intend to explore the approach to the displaying of insignia, the dissemination of publications and self-directing promotion of the group. My preference would be simply to put that on to the statute book. I would like also to explore the prospect of a flexible, discretionary approach to be applied to particular organisations by the Secretary of State through regulation. I hope that is an issue that we can get into in Committee.